Author's website Alexander Korotko

I’d like to say to my memory: that’s not how it was.
it wasn’t like that in my childhood, it was much more romantic.
and loftier. It seemed to me that my town
of my childhood, Korosten and I had one name.
and it was an exclamation point!
My town was my grandmother, the narrow alley,
where our little house stood, the mysterious river Uzh,
filled with meanings and visions from fairy tales,
and the nameless square where, under the sawdust.
stored mountains of ice, as hot as our desires.
and dreams of ice cream.
Saturday stood apart in our town,
majestic and haughty. Like Babylon,
beckoned the crowds on market day,
and it was not the expulsion of a whole people
from their homes, but the voluntary captivity
of incorruptible curiosity.
Childhood always has a great weariness
of the day. and dreams fill the little soul
the little soul with a mosaic of impressions, coloured
pictures full of fiction, which, in the morning.
it’s impossible to retell. No, they’re not forgotten,
they just take on a status unavailable to the
to the planet of rapture.
How do you start over? You don’t. Time puts you
chained, collared and forcibly removed
from your childhood, dragging you through life.
while constantly telling you not to look back or you’ll turn
you’ll turn into a pillar of salt like Lot’s sinful wife.
Lot, and you don’t look back, you run, you run,
but you don’t come running.